"Effective branding of yourself, your company and your products, coupled with effective advertising designed to increase footfalls and/or website traffic and an effective interactive social media presence WILL build market share and, when integrated properly, can DOMINATE any market."

Newsletters And E-Zines: What Should You Expect?

In the online marketing world, and especially the Internet Marketing/Make Money Online niche, pretty much every marketer or site owner offers incentives like free downloads to entice visitors to sign up for their e-mail newsletter or e-zine. You sign up to receive it and the e-mails start to roll in every day or every few days. But just what should you expect from these e-mails?

On forums and social media you’ll often see complaints that once they’ve signed up, all they receive is promotion after promotion with each e-zine issue highlighting another product or service for sale. This isn’t what most people expect when opting in, yet once you understand the issue and the industry it makes perfect sense.

When e-mail marketing first started in the 1990’s, most e-zines contained a lot of good information about whatever niche the e-zines covered. That was the right format for its time, since the world wide web was in its infancy and everyone was just getting started. It was also just about the only way to dispense the information outside of paid products. But then things changed…

The first change was spam filters for e-mail inboxes, originated by a couple of the big online e-mail platforms. In many niches (parenting, pets, etc.) they had little effect except to block some of the bulk unsolicited commercial e-mails, which was their purpose. But in a classic case of ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’, in niches like Internet marketing, health, exercise & weight loss there was a LOT of spam, and the filters got a lot more aggressive in blocking e-mails – including many of the e-zines that covered those areas of interest.

The second major change helped to fix that though with the advent of blogging software. Suddenly there was an easy way to make the information available online without having to be a professional webmaster. Now much of the information people wanted from their e-zine subscriptions was available for free without having to wait for newsletter issues. The real issue became remembering what sites had the best information and remembering to go back and check for updates as time went on.

So then, and continuing to today, the information you want is readily available across the blogosphere and in various products, free and for sale. Coupled with that, especially in the Internet Marketing arena, you now have people who are just getting started, people who have been in the industry for a few years and have modest online marketing success and the pros who have been marketing online for years – often a decade or more – and are making 6, 7 or 8 figures a year online.

That’s where the online newsletters playing field is today. You can’t cover basics in it because you lose the interest of those at middle or advanced stages. Dealing with issues common only to those who have been functioning at a higher level means alienating those just getting started. So by default the most value a marketer can offer in today’s online e-zines is to point out the new products as they become available, being sure to feature products aimed at each level of user and covering the range of functions readers want to know about.

Make no mistake – the authors of the e-zines you receive do not expect you to buy 5 different products from them every week. They expect you will have zeroed in on the path your want to follow to achieve your goals and that you will check out the products or services that can help YOU with the tasks you’re facing RIGHT NOW. Presenting their thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers with a wide variety of products and services lets every level of subscriber find the right ones for them. And that’s what you should expect from a professional marketing e-zine.

There are many ways to succeed, whether in business, health, fitness, weight maintenance or any of the other niches online. Follow the topics that interest you on social media and across the various blogs in your niche and identify both your chosen path to success and the publishers and bloggers in that niche that resound with you and your personal style – then subscribe to their newsletters. And when the e-zines start arriving in your inbox, if the featured product or service doesn’t help you right now, skip it. If it will help you, or even might help right now, then click through and check it out in more detail to see if it’s right for you at your current level on your current path. Don’t just grab everything that comes along, but stick to your path and get just those products or services that can help you today, or at least within the next month or two.

Remember that you’re charting your own course online while people publishing newsletters and magazines need to address the needs of huge numbers of subscribers, not just you. If you want more direct help, invest in the best personal coaching and mentoring program you can reasonably afford without breaking the budget. And in the meantime, expect and enjoy exposure to a wide variety of products and services from the e-zines you subscribe to. After all, if you’re not kept abreast of what’s newly available in your areas of interest then you have no way of knowing whether the goods and services you’re using are the best for you, do you? Once you realize that, you know what to expect from newsletters and e-zines and are ready to use them as the valuable tools they truly are!

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Doug Champigny, The Success Lifestylist, is a world-famous author, speaker and mentor who has been helping corporations, companies, retailers, entrepreneurs and other individuals and organizations to achieve true success for over 30 years so far...

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